Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Ancestors and Climate in Our Boston Backyard

Registration is required: 

This is the second event is a six-part series that will take place live on Zoom and is free and open to the public. Attendees must register for each event separately. For those wishing to engage in discussion of the presentations with other audience members, Diane L. Moore will convene a live discussion on Zoom for one hour following each presentation. 

Two hundred years ago, the residents of metropolitan Boston faced a climate crisis. White settlers had destroyed the region’s pine forests, triggering dangerous disruptions to both water and carbon cycles. Activists responded by creating forest parks on previously disrupted landscapes. But many of these activists were themselves descended from the settlers who had caused the harm they sought to heal. In imperfect yet instructive ways, they blended ecological care with new forms of ancestral devotion. Gradually they learned what indigenous communities had long known: that care for the more-than-human-world is inseparable from care for our ancestors. In this session, Dan McKanan, will discuss these stories and how they can help contemporary Bostonians, and others, recognize that what makes a place wild is not the absence of humans but the presence of ancestors.

Speaker: Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity
Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

Dan McKanan, AB '89, joined the HDS faculty in 2008. He researches religious and spiritual movements for social transformation in the United States and beyond. McKanan serves on the Unitarian Universalist Panel on Theological Education and the board of the Unitarian Universalist Studies Network. At Harvard, he serves as chair of the MTS Curriculum Committee and as faculty director for the Divinity School’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality.

For more information on the full series, "Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: A Series of Public Online Conversations," visit hds.harvard.edu….